Staten Island: The Unfinished Puzzle

About five minutes ago, I was surfing silive.com, and I came across this article, which asked us, quite plainly, what makes us mad? Well, I'm going to use this blog to tell everyone what pisses me off more than most other things, one of my greatest pet peeves....don't laugh.....I can't stand unfinished or unconnected streets.

Let me explain by example. Those of you who live in Annadale, or who travel through there frequently, know it is a horrendous mess of dead-end streets and potholes galore. Don't get me wrong, Annadale has lots of charm...tall trees, quiet streets, the Annadale Green and surrounding commercial district is a cornerstone of the neighborhood which I admire, but how can anybody appreciate any of that when you can't get from A to B?

However, when I was out biking yesterday in Annadale, I saw something that, well, if it's what I think it is, made me so incredibly happy. Between Ionia Avenue and Detroit Avenue, a new stretch of Belfield Avenue is being built out, and Detroit is being completed to where it will meet with Jefferson Boulevard. At present, the trees have been cleared (leaving plenty to shade the new streets, of course), and it looks like sewers are being put in. I was therefore able to infer that they would be paving through a new street, in the right-of-way it was always alotted, but never took advantage of.

You're probably wondering why this is a pet peeve of mine. Why do I care so much about such a purely aesthetic issue? Well, let me first say that there is a difference between purposefully designed dead-end streets, and streets which are simply incomplete. Streets which are designed to end in cul-de-sacs or loops or whatever, well, some people like that. I don't particularly (refer to last post), but some people do, and they are entitled to their own tastes. Then ther are cases of streets like Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Finlay Streets in Tottenville, which could have been finished to connect with Shore Road. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your point of view), houses were built in the right of way, and the streets will never be finished. Even that, I can accept.

But then, you look at streets like Sinclair Avenue, between Delmar and Nippon Avenues in Huguenot (don't even really get me started on Huguenot around there), or Radigan & Maguire Avenues, and Bombay & Gervil Streets in Rossville, which have no reason to sit as incomplete streets the way they do. What is that? That, I cannot understand. Aesthically, it us unappealing and pointless, but the real stupidity is it's utter inefficiency in a way that most people fail to realize.

What is, and has been for many years, the number one issue of Staten Island? Ladies and gentlemen, we return to the subject of traffic. Aggravating, polluting, road-choking TRAFFIC. The simplicity of my theory is thus: The more ways there are to get from place to place (i.e. more completed streets and roads), the more traffic will spread out in between the different ways.

I will use another case-study here. Let's look at Harold Avenue in SE Annadale. It runs close to and parallel to Arden Avenue, one of the South Shore's busier major arteries. Harold is almost completely finished except for the top stretch between Edwin Street and Amboy Road, a length of four blocks, three of which have yet to be paved. If it were completed through to Amboy Road, not only would it visually establish an eastern border to Blue Heron Park (aesthetics again lol), but it would become a new way of reaching Amboy for the local residents surrounding Harold Avenue, thereby alleviating some traffic on congested Arden, and it might even indirectly relieve the Amboy-Arden intersection of some of its traffic as well.

That was simply one case, but I feel like this concept rings true all over the South Shore, which is still being built out constantly since 1964. You can see now, why the completion of Belfield and Detroit Avenues in Annadale (above) was exciting to me. It will create new connections between three overly long blocks, and will be good for daytime traffic from nearby P.S. 36.

All I can say is, though a larger population will continue to bring new and greater problems of urban life to our shore, if we recognize them now and get creative to solve them, the problems will be fewer and farther between.